Your Daily Beethoven (and friends)

Among the eleven extant recordings of Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the recording of the 1943 performance in Berlin is the most famous, conveying both unspeakable anguish as well as the unshakable faith that humanity would ultimately prevail.

In his closing remarks at his sham “de-nazification” trial, Furtwängler said: “I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians. These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, of Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it was like. Does Thomas Mann [who was critical of Furtwängler's actions] really believe that in 'the Germany of Himmler' one should not be permitted to play Beethoven? Could he not realize that people never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror? I do not regret having stayed with them.”